What you are hungry for, longing for, is a clue to our hunger for God. Our Creator brings us to fulfillment of life.

What is alive in you today? To come more to life today?

One theme I hear as a pastor — loneliness. Half of Americans feel disconnected. They have fewer than daily or weekly conversations about something meaningful. This can shorten lives, but being connected to one another can lengthen our lives.

You were likely conceived in love and surely connected to God’s love and biologically connected to your mother. Yet we all have felt brokenness of disconnection, fears of being separate from one another. We protect ourselves. We work hard to stave off those feelings – sometimes, by being really busy. The illusion of being connected.

Or by being very active on social media (which of course can also be good and heavy users are no more lonely than home who don’t use it!)

By numbing ourselves – drinking or eating.

By preparing for all the ways we might be disappointed and never stepping into any connections.

Life and love and connections are the very things that bring us to life.

What is alive in you today?

Are you wired? Jesus used that kind of example but his metaphor was the vine.

Picture a vine. Jesus is the stem. God the father is the grower, tending the vine, we are rooted into this vine, this flow of love and life-giving love that moves through and around us.

The ways we disconnect ourselves: we are raised to be independent, more a me than a we. We are raised to believe that we shouldn’t need each other so much. It is scary to think we need to be rooted together. It is real to fear you will be disappointed or that YOU will disappoint someone else. ‘I must be odd, alone in this.’